I’m well aware that this article is in danger to get into an apples vs. oranges comparison. Bookshelves can be filled with books about Wolfram’s Mathematica and JupyterLab/Jupyter, many of them demonstrating how very different the software tools are. Mathematica is a commercial software package, JupyterLab is an open-source web application…

This blog post was inspired by two op-eds on arstechnica. One arguing that PGP’s1 weak link is the difficulty to ensure the security of the secret key over its lifetime. A compromised secret key is a catastrophic event, making all prior encrypted messages accessible. Additionally, there are disqualifying UX issues. PGP is…

I have been using ZFS for a while on more than one platform and I thought it might be interesting to write about my setup at home. I was —admittingly to a small degree— involved testing1 when OpenZFS on OS X was in its early development, so I can also present a small part of ZFS history from my personal point of view.

As a Mac user and programmer I have been dabbling with Xcode a few times in the past. It was never a primary interest, but a required tool to get started with Objective-C and native Mac GUI development. Objective-C was a curiosity for me. It is syntactically quite different from the C family…

About 10 years ago I was working on a project for Procter & Gamble that required me to have remote access to their computer system. To gain access, I not only had to provide a password, but also a six-digit number displayed by a Secure ID key fob. The displayed number changed every minute, preventing a…

This is the second blog post in a two part series describing my journey through the myriads of web-hosting options to find the one that is right for me. The first part described how the software stack I had in mind influenced the hosting choices I was considering. With a little bias toward a solution…

If you read my first blog post, you know how I ended up with GRAV to build this website. As a next step, you might expect me to follow up with a blog post about the design and coding of this website. But, eager to disappoint, I will skip right over that. Not without a good reason, though…

Data breaches that compromise personal accounts have become a frequent occurrence. I was an involuntary participant in such an event in October 2013 when Adobe got hacked. Despite the fact that Adobe stored the passwords encrypted, there is no guarantee that the hackers were not able to retrieve…

If you start a new blog, and one of the reasons you do so is to capture and
catalog interesting things you spent a good chunk of your time on, it seems appropriate
to start by describing how the blog came about,
and how it was all put together from a technical point of view.